FN Dish

Beer Maker Aims to End Food Waste One Beer at a Time

A new beer made from old bread is the toast of England — and now it’s set to arrive stateside.

Toast Ale, which is made using “fresh, surplus” breads that haven’t sold at bakeries day’s end and unloved end pieces from loaves used to make sandwiches at delis and sandwich shops, has become quite popular across the pond, where it has been available at London eateries, via distributors and online, since it was introduced in 2016.

Now the British entreprenbrewer behind the beer, Tristram Stewart, is spinning off his London/North Yorkshire operation and bringing it to a craft brewer in the Bronx, which has begun to produce its American Pale Ale. Sometime after operations get up to speed — they’re hoping around July 4 — Toast’s American Pale Ale will be available at Whole Foods as well as at restaurants and bars in New York City, the New York Times reports.

But what’s special about Toast is not necessarily its taste, though it does claim to have “delicious and subtle caramel notes from the bread” and has gotten high marks from the fooderati, but rather its mission to help end food waste, one slice-of-bread-turned-bottle-of-beer at a time.

“Did you know 44 percent of all bread produced ends up being wasted?” the Toast Ale website asks. “We’re on a mission to change that.”

According to a Indiegogo page aimed to raise funds ahead of its U.S. debut, which it is making with an eye toward a coast-to-coast bread-beer spread. Once Toast Ale ramps up sales, it promises to donate 100 percent of all profits from ale sales to Feedback, a global organization founded by Stewart that aims to stamp out food waste “at every level of the food system.”